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It’s all old business in “New Business.” Characters are placed against their limitations, while the past continues to harken back in less-than-desirable ways. If there’s one idea that these final episodes of Mad Men seem to be collectively approaching, it might just be that tune which opened last week’s episode, “Severance”: is that all there is?
I asked myself that very question as “New Business” wrapped up its various, intersecting story arcs. Through its lack of focus and flatness in tone, this was to a significant degree the weakest episode that Matthew Weiner and co. have churned out in quite some time.
It’s not that I’m frustrated with Weiner’s decision to focus so heavily on secondary and tertiary characters, even if the time spent with, particularly, Megan and her family turned tiresome quickly. I didn’t feel that the show was rehashing old themes in regards to Don’s dalliance with Elizabeth Reaser’s Diana, though it did run down a rather predictable route. And I respect Weiner and his team enough to give an episode like this a chance, even if it lacks the weighty significance or emotional resonance of an episode like “Severance.”
But “New Business” is, through and through, an inconsistently put-together episode, and it’s there where my mind wound up decidedly against it. There are continuity errors. The editing is rapidly inelegant, quite unlike its usual confidence in pace and style. David Carbonara’s score swells in the fashion of gratuitous mid-century melodrama. It's as if the whole affair was put together last-minute, without much time to pay attention to detail. Mad Men is, normally, a work to marvel at for its technical proficiency and precision. And yet, all through this episode, I found myself trying to get into its rhythms only to be knocked back to Earth.
This episode also reminded me of last year’s “Field Trip” for the way it worked to thematically link a set of storylines that tonally didn’t mesh. We had Don trying to convince himself and Diana that he was ready for something long-term, serious and (presumably) exclusive. We had Peggy come to terms with the limitations that professional women come up against (not unlike last episode). We had Megan return after an amicable split from Don last season, nearly unbearable in her bitterness (as a longtime Megan defender, this part stung the most). In all three cases, “New Business” found its characters at various levels of discontent and disillusionment: what was originally “new” revealed itself to be the status quo, mainly because these characters keep falling into old habits and making the same mistakes. It nicely builds on the thematic journey of “Severance,” but it opts for a duller, tell-not-show method. Whereas last week’s installment told these stories from the emotional center of its characters, “New Business” is heavy on content and clunky dialogue to get the message across.
Most effective in “New Business” are the scenes between Don and Diana, who spend the episode making a go of something beyond their midnight tryst. It’s no accident that these scenes play out a little more heightened than is typical for Mad Men, with an unsettling undercurrent sweeping through each of their scenes. Don’s not running off with some random waitress he met a month ago, but Weiner effectively zeroes in on his inexplicable attraction to her. The gloom and despair she carries throughout “Severance” is explained in “New Business”: she lost a child, but ran away from her still-living husband and second daughter. Her shame and isolation rather obviously parallels Don’s -- while he’s understanding and sympathetic after she reveals her secret, the subsequent, unspoken tension makes clear that whatever commonality they share cannot be transferred into a legitimate romantic entanglement. But if not clear enough on its own, in swells Carbonara’s composition to overwhelmingly dictate the mood -- as if the series unknowingly wandered into a Douglas Sirk film, or maybe an episode of The Affair.
Perhaps, as a mood piece, this arc could work on its own. But when placed against a very by-the-book, Peggy Olson-learns-about-the-business storyline, it simply jars. Mimi Rogers enters the Mad Men universe as Pima, a trendy, worldly new client who Peggy hires over Stan to shoot an ad. Stan has been around for a while, and yet “New Business” is probably the first time we spend substantial time with him independently. Throughout, Weiner and director Michael Uppendahl seem uncomfortable with that very fact, shying away from his domestic scenes at every turn. Specifically, the moments with his girlfriend are extremely brief, merely conveying a sad irony -- that Stan is happily in a relationship, and yet, he allows himself to be seduced by Pima -- without actually engaging with it. The swift cutting in and out of the Stan-Peggy-Pima affair disallows the story from making any sort of impact beyond its narrative significance. Pima is revealed to be a hustler, her expression of confidence and modernity -- including a stylish pants-suit -- a mere facade to land prospective jobs. For a minute at a time, we see the story’s progression: in scene one, we meet her; in scene two, she kisses Stan (and is embraced); in scene three, she kisses Peggy (and is rejected); in scene four, Peggy turns her away. Put it all together, and what’s left is a half-baked exercise in connecting the dots.
If Weiner gave that the short shrift, however, it was probably so he could make as much time as possible for a certain ex-wife of Don’s. I can understand his decision to square-in so heavily on Megan and her family here, both because of how they fit into the episode’s template and because he wanted to give her a proper farewell. But it’s here where Weiner once again runs into trouble with the changed episode order, a theme I found hurting him in the early-going of last “season” as well. We left Megan perfectly last year, her break-up phone call with Don a heartbreaking, human and yet inevitable moment of dissolution. All that work seems undone, perhaps deliberately, in “New Business.” She comes into episode bitter and desperate, meeting with Harry Crane for job opportunities (he propositions her, with the effectiveness of the scene unfortunately dependent on its degree of creepiness) and treating Don with nasty disregard. He dutifully pays her off with a check for $1 million, which in today’s dollars is about $6 million, and sends her off.
The huge leap in terms of Megan’s behavior and personality makes logical sense, but -- as with Joan’s sudden disdain for Don last year -- her transformation comes off as unavoidably extreme. Weiner’s approach here is inherently contradictory, as he grants us one last Megan-heavy episode but without allowing us to previously see how her major emotional shift took place. It’s a hard conceit to accept, much less connect with in an episode already at-odds tonally. (Jessica Pare’s line-reading of “Qu’est ci passe?” was also, I feel compelled to mention, ridiculously hammy.)
That this arc also absorbs Roger into the main action so randomly doesn’t help matters, either. He comes to help out his old fling, Megan’s mother Marie, to pay the movers -- she’s getting Megan’s stuff (and, more importantly, most of Don’s stuff) out of the New York apartment -- and promptly sleeps with her, quick to be caught by Megan thereafter. From there, we learn that Marie is leaving her husband, much to the horror of Megan’s hitherto unmentioned sister (Megan, a divorcee herself, gets it). “New Business” is oddly heavy on such European-American comparisons, mainly in the perception of divorce, and what’s ultimately conveyed in that regard is an uneven (and rather dull) inquiry into modernity.
“New Business” ends as any person paying attention would expect, on the image of Don alone in his empty apartment, the furniture having been taken out. It’s a beautiful shot, the conveyance of emptiness and removal immensely effective. Weiner seems to proceed with that image in mind as an inevitable endpoint. Consequentially, rather than a wholly, independently compelling episode, “New Business” lands flat, too dominantly defined by that final shot and thus inorganic in its progression.
This sense of what was once new being stripped away is a compelling, salient idea for Mad Men to contend with. But “New Business” felt thrown together, identifying something profound but neglecting to grapple with it. This isn’t close to Mad Men at its best, so here’s to hoping that the show course-corrects next week.
Grade: C
Notes
* January Jones and Christopher Stanley pop up, with Betty and the Francis family seeming a little happier than they’ve been in the past. Betty reveals she’s getting her Masters in psychology, explaining humorously that “people love talking to” her. (Here’s an arc I would have much rather spent time with this week.) No matter, that sense of Don almost completely faded from his old family was a nice touch to begin the episode. (But where’s Sally?!)
* I mentioned continuity errors, but didn’t go into them in the review, so: Don returned home with golf clubs immediately after he and Pete had talked about renting the golf clubs; Don said he’d meet Diana at her work, but literally a second later she showed up at his apartment; and for some reason, Stan’s girlfriend never took off her white nurse’s hat even though she was at home the whole time. These things normally wouldn’t bother me much at all, but they seriously aided in the feeling that this episode was clumsily assembled.
* No Joan this week. I do wonder how much story is left to tell with her.
* Oh, and Linda Cardellini returns as Sylvia! The scene with the Rosens, Diana and Don in the elevator was splendidly awkward and perfectly-staged. With each episode re-introducing a past fling of Don’s so far, I hope the trend continues: it’s a creative way to bring the show full-circle.